So, you'd recommend Christians watch it?

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what about Canada and Australia?  They still swear allegiance to the Queen right?

I'm Australian, so speak for yourself. I'm not swearing allegiance to someone who just happened to be born in the right family. I'd much rather live in a Republic where the head of state is someone we've all voted in, like George W Bush... no wait...

Yeah, swearing allegiance to stuff/people is a USA thing. We in Canada just have the Queen on the money and sometimes she visits so we have a party.

Close Encounters - I listened to the commentary and enjoyed your discussion about how didactic movies have become since the 1970s. In mainstream big budget American movies, evildoers are punished, and the virtuous are rewarded. In indie films and in European films, you can have moral ambiguity that reflects life i.e. bastards can prosper without getting a come-uppance and the innocent can suffer.

There must be some budget level (e.g. $1 million? $5 million?) where suddenly studio execs insist 'no that child/kitten cannot die' and that villain has to be killed/jailed at the end.

I think it comes back to the William Goldman definition we've quoted more than once:  A "Hollywood movie" tells us what we want to hear, while an "indie movie" tells us what we don't want to hear.  It's more of a content thing than a budget thing, but nowadays it tends to be the same thing anyway.   

It's always a risk to make a movie that makes the audience sad, or angry, or think about things they don't want to have to think about, etc... unless you fix everything by the end, and leave them with a tidy "love conquers all" or "good always beats evil in the end" moral to take home.  There are people who can appreciate a movie that dares to say the opposite, and once in a while a movie like that can even become a mainstream hit, but let's be honest... it's rare.

Studio movies are so darn expensive now that they're reluctant to risk investing in a movie that a lot of people won't like.   Hence the sterotypical studio notes that always want the good guys to be gooder, the bad guys to be badder, the endings to be happy, and everything in between be simple enough to follow. 

As much as we like to complain about that, I dunno if I can really blame them... if it was ME who was about to place 70 million on the table, I'd be inclined to play the safer odds, too.

You go but I go

Last edited by Fido (2012-01-27 19:03:59)

Why?

Last edited by Jimmy B (2012-02-01 19:05:24)

Wow. I had no idea England had such a bad rap, or was so self-conscious about its nationality.  Where does the "evil Nazi person" stigma come from?

Over here we have folks who still like to display the Confederate flag.  While there are some who genuinely believe "the south will rise again," mostly it's either tongue-in-cheek or simply folks who are genuinely proud to be from those states.  They have to contend with some degree of "racist" stereotypes, not necessarily undeserved (some really are), but I don't know of anyone who would hide those colors on that basis.

They try to hide that behind the more modern argument of 'states rights', if they're actually displaying the flag for that reason. I live in 'Bama, so I see them a lot, and for the most part I think people just associate it with 'The South' in general, rather than all the politics and negative implications of that time.

People also call it the Stars & Bars, but it's actually the confederate naval flag. The Stars & Bars was the first official flag of the confederacy, and looked nothing like the southern cross at all. The army's battle flag was very similar, but was square. You can tell the different versions of the flag here. If you live in or have traveled through the south, you may have seen several variations of the flag and wondered what the differences were. http://www.usflag.org/history/confedera … dbars.html

It should be noted that toward the bottom of that page, the author makes the State's Rights argument I was talking about. I think state's rights are great, but if that's what you're all about, it would almost make more sense to fly the old Gadsden flag.

Last edited by Squiggly_P (2012-02-01 23:50:26)